Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Yeates, Director of the Australian National Insect Collection, CSIRO

Curious Kids is a series for children, where we ask experts to answer questions from kids. All questions are welcome: find out how to enter at the bottom. You might also like the podcast Imagine This, a co-production between ABC KIDS listen and The Conversation, based on Curious Kids.

Hi. Why do flies vomit on their food? – Lili, age 10, Adelaide.

Fantastic question, Lili.

It’s about that time of year where we start firing up the barbeques. Lucky for us, we have no problem eating our delicious sausage sandwiches because we have teeth (or even knives and forks if we’re feeling fancy) to help us break the food into smaller pieces, making it easier for us to swallow. But flies don’t have any teeth and rely on other ways to digest their food – like vomiting.

When a fly’s feeling hungry, it will land on its food and vomit out a mix of saliva and stomach acids. These liquids have digestive proteins that help to break down the food before it even enters the fly’s mouth, turning a solid meal into a soup. Like using a straw, the fly uses its long sucking mouthpart to slurp up its liquefied meal. Their mouthparts even have sponges at the end so they fly can suck up every last drop.

Read more: Curious Kids: Where do flies sleep?

How dirty are flies?

Because some species like the common bush fly and house fly are attracted to our food, they can sometimes make us sick. This is because there can be tiny disease-causing microbes that hitch a ride on fly’s feet and are left behind on our food when the fly touches it. That’s one reason why we don’t leave our food uncovered for too long. Scientists at the CSIRO’s Australian National Insect Collection are using DNA to identify which microbes are transmitted by the feet and vomit of bush flies. This will be able to answer the age old question of how dirty flies really are.

Garden-friendly flies

Bush flies and blowflies all vomit on their food, but other flies are a little more polite at the dinner table and don’t vomit at all. Did you know there are 30,000 known species of flies in Australia? Horse flies (sometimes called march flies) and flower flies have a sweet tooth and love to drink nectar! They use their mouthparts to reach inside a flower and suck up nectar, which is full of sugar and nutrients. As they move from flower to flower drinking nectar, the fly’s hairy beard gets covered in pollen. Did you know that flies help pollinate some of Australia’s favourite native plants like the tea tree, Eucalyptus and Grevillea? Some flies, like black and gold horse fly (Osca lata), drink so much nectar that their abdomens taste like honey!

Many flies are collected with pollen still attached to them and CSIRO Scientists are mapping the DNA from the pollen stuck to the insect’s body to identify which species of plants they pollinate.

Hard working flies

Flies have many important jobs in nature that we take for granted. The larvae of flies, affectionately called maggots, love to recycle nutrients by eating dead plants and animals, and converting them into nutrients that can be used by other plants and fungi. Without flies we would be waist-deep in waste! Mosquito larvae are an important diet for fish, frogs and birds. If we wished away mosquitoes, many of these larger animals would go hungry because they won’t be able to eat their favourite wriggling food.

So as you enjoy your sausage sanga this summer, appreciate how we digest food and spare a thought (and serviette) for the poor, toothless fly.

Read more: Curious Kids: What are spider webs made from and how strong are they?

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Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Suranga Seneviratne, Lecturer – Security, University of Sydney

It’s been a busy few weeks for cybersecurity researchers and reporters. There was the Facebook hack, the Google plus data breach, and allegations that the Chinese government implanted spying chips in hardware components.

In the midst of all this, some other important news was overlooked. In early September, Apple removed several Trend Micro anti-malware tools from the Mac app store after they were found to be collecting unnecessary personal information from users, such as browser history. Trend Micro has now removed this function from the apps.

It’s a good reminder that not all security apps will make your online movements more secure – and, in some cases, they could be worse than doing nothing at all. It’s wise to do your due diligence before you download that ad-blocker or VPN – read on for some tips.

Read more: Encrypted smartphones secure your identity, not just your data

Security apps

There are range of tools people use to protect themselves from cyber threats:

• Virtual private networks (VPNs) allow you to establish a secure connection with a remote server and route all your traffic through it so it can’t be tracked by your internet service provider. VPNs are commonly used to access geo-blocked content, and for additional privacy.

• Ad-blockers prevent advertisements from appearing on the websites you visit.

• App-lockers allow you to set passwords for individual apps. For example, if somebody borrowed your phone to make a call, and then tried to access your Facebook app.

• Tor hides your identity while you browse the internet, by encrypting and moving your traffic across multiple Tor nodes.

Read more: As more vulnerabilities are discovered. Is it time to uninstall antivirus software?

Know the risks

There are multiple dangers in using these kinds of security software, especially without the proper background knowledge. The risks include:

Accessing unnecessary data

Many security tools request access to your personal information. In many cases, they need to do this to protect your device. For example, antivirus software requires information such as browser history, personal files, and unique identifiers to function. But in some cases, tools request more access than they need for functionality. This was the case with the Trend Micro apps.

Creating a false sense of security

It makes sense that if you download a security app, you believe your online data is more secure. But sometimes mobile security tools don’t provide security at the expected levels, or don’t provide the claimed services at all. If you think you can install a state-of-the-art mobile malware detection tool and then take risks online, you are mistaken.

For example, a 2017 study showed it was not hard to create malware that can bypass 95% of commercial Android antivirus tools. Another study showed that 18% of mobile VPN apps did not encrypt user traffic at all. And if you are using Tor, there are many mistakes you can make that will compromise your anonymity and privacy – especially if you are not familiar with the Tor setup and try to modify its configurations.

Lately, there have been reports of fake antivirus software, which open backdoors for spyware, ransomware and adware, occupying the top spots on the app charts. Earlier this year it was reported that 20 million Google Chrome users had downloaded fake ad-blocker extensions.

Software going rogue

Numerous free – or paid – security software is available in app stores created by enthusiastic individual developers or small companies. While this software can provide handy features, they can be poorly maintained. More importantly, they can be hijacked or bought by attackers, and then used to harvest personal information or propagate malware. This mainly happens in the case of browser extensions.

Know what you’re giving away

The table below shows what sort of personal data are being requested by the top-10 antivirus, app-locker and ad-blocking apps in the Android app store. As you can see, antivirus tools have access to almost all the data stored in the mobile phone.

That doesn’t necessarily mean any of these apps are doing anything bad, but it’s worth noting just how much personal information we are entrusting to these apps without knowing much about them.

Read more: Explainer: how malware gets inside your apps

How to be safer

Follow these pointers to do a better job of keeping your smart devices secure:

Consider whether you need a security app

If you stick to the official apps stores, install few apps, and browse only a routine set of websites, you probably don’t need extra security software. Instead, simply stick to the security guidelines provided by the manufacturer, be diligent about updating your operating system, and don’t click links from untrusted sources.

If you do, use antivirus software

But before you select one, read product descriptions and online reviews. Stick to solutions from well-known vendors. Find out what it does, and most importantly what it doesn’t do. Then read the permissions it requests and see whether they make sense. Once installed, update the software as required.

Be careful with other security tools

Only install other security tools, such as ad-blockers, app-lockers and VPN clients, if it is absolutely necessary and you trust the developer. The returns from such software can be minimal when compared with the associated risks.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Daryl Higgins, Professor & Director, Institute of Child Protection Studies, Australian Catholic University

Today, Prime Minister Scott Morrison will make a national apology to victims and survivors of institutional child sexual abuse at Parliament House in Canberra. It is not a hollow gesture.

It is important for us a nation. It is from all Australians. It provides formal acknowledgement of people who have suffered immense hurt.

Until there is recognition, it feels like people’s experiences are being denied and silenced.

It matters because it is the first time an Australian government will acknowledge the failures by governments, faith-based and other community organisations to keep children and young people safe, and to respond appropriately to allegations.

Read more: Royal commission report makes preventing institutional sexual abuse a national responsibility

It acknowledges that this harm was not an isolated event. It was spread across myriad organisations. From a public policy perspective, it shows that as a country we failed to value children and their right to safety.

We didn’t ask questions. We didn’t seek hard enough to prevent abuse. We failed to listen to the experiences of victims and their families.

For five years, we followed the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, which led to the release of its final report with 189 recommendations in December 2017.

The lessons from the 57 public hearings, and the heartbreaking testimony from 8,013 private sessions, are many.

The findings highlight the significant failures of institutions, and the steps we need to take to keep children safe in organisations in future.

For the apology to be meaningful, Australians will want concrete actions to provide redress for those already harmed.

A national redress scheme for victims of child sexual abuse in organisations has already been announced. It will allow survivors access to a direct personal response, psychological counselling and compensation of up to $150,000.

But what people really need to hear is that things will change. They want to know what is changing in youth-serving organisations. How will the mistakes from the past not be repeated?

They need to hear how child-safe strategies will become standard practice. How will they, for example, be embedded into funding arrangements and accountability requirements?

If organisations won’t prioritise the safety and well-being of children, then the public purse should not be open to them.

The apology is also a significant part of the maturing of the country.

Australians stood by while abuse happened. We did not all necessarily condone individual behaviours, although the royal commission made it clear that many did.

However, we all accepted a standard in the community that allowed abuse to go unchecked and didn’t value children sufficiently. There was no rush to put in place robust systems to prevent or intervene at the earliest signs of concern.

Child sexual abuse thrives on secrecy, silence and shame.

Child sexual abuse prevention requires grooming behaviour to be understood and acknowledged, so someone can step in to stop it.

The good news is that governments have started responding. Victoria now has Child Safe Standards in place, and many jurisdictions have developed “reportable conduct” schemes that require workers to notify authorities of abusive behaviours in an organisation.

Draft National Principles for Child-Safe Organisations have been agreed to by community services ministers from across the country. They will be submitted to the Council of Australian Governments for endorsement in late 2018.

Read more: The royal commission’s final report has landed – now to make sure there is an adequate redress scheme

To ensure the mistakes – and the trauma – of the past are not repeated, organisations that serve young people must undergo a cultural change to value children, and listen to and respond to their views about safety and well-being. This means:

• implementing training about risks and appropriate responses
• understanding how grooming behaviour could occur
• putting in place strategies to prevent or “interrupt” predatory behaviour.

It’s not just a matter of trying to identify and weed out “bad” people, as the behaviour is often secretive and the motive difficult to discern. Sometimes the risks are not just from adults, but from other young people.

Instead, organisations can adopt prevention strategies that focus on modifying risky environments (including physical structures, policies and supervision practices), so that it is harder for would-be perpetrators to behave as they did in the past. Governance, funding arrangements and accreditation should be contingent on serious progress towards a culture of safety.

If, in his apology, Morrison provides public acknowledgement of the harms, and hopefully a commitment to ensuring the highest standards of prevention, it will not only acknowledge the suffering past victims have endured — and continue to — but ensure their suffering was not in vain.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nick Haslam, Professor of Psychology, University of Melbourne

Grief can seem desolate for those in the thick of it who often feel unable to imagine a way out of their suffering. But, as time passes, the pain usually dampens or becomes more fleeting.

Understanding the normal trajectory of grief matters for the person experiencing the grief and those treating them. Attempts to provide a map of the bereavement process have typically proposed a sequence of stages. The “five stages” model is the best known, with the stages being denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

While there is some evidence for these stages, the experience of grief is highly individualised and not well captured by their fixed sequence. Some of the five stages may be absent, their order may be jumbled, certain experiences may rise to prominence more than once and the progression of stages may stall. The age of the bereaved person and the cause of death may also shape the grief process.

Stages of grief

The first major attempt to outline the stages of grief was made by British psychiatrist John Bowlby, father of attachment theory, an influential account of how infants and children form close bonds to their care-givers. Bowlby and his colleague Colin Parkes proposed four stages of grieving.

The first is of numbness and shock, when the loss is not accepted or seen as not real. The second stage of yearning and searching is marked by a sense of emptiness. The mourner is preoccupied with the person who has been lost, seeking reminders and reliving memories.

In the third stage, despair and disorganisation set in. This is a sense of hopelessness and sometimes anger where the bereaved person may withdraw into depression. Finally, in the re-organisation and recovery stage, hope rekindles and there is a gradual return to the rhythms of daily life.

Read more: Death and families – when ‘normal’ grief can last a lifetime

Bowlby and Parkes’s model, first proposed in the early 1960s, may have been the first. However, it’s Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s model coined in 1969 that has become the most widely known. Her five stages of grief – originally developed to map patient responses to terminal illness – have become famous. They have been applied not only to responses to death but also to a variety of other losses.

Kübler-Ross’s first stage, denial, resembles what Bowlby and Parkes labelled numbness and shock, but her second, anger, departs from their scheme. The affected person demands to understand why the loss or illness has taken place, and why it has happened to them. In the third stage, bargaining, the person may be consumed with “if only”, guiltily wishing they could go back in time and undo whatever may have led to the illness, or death.

Stages four and five involve depression and acceptance. Despair and withdrawal gradually give way to a sense of fully acknowledging and making peace with the loss.

Evidence for the five stages

Kübler-Ross’s stages emerged from her clinical work with dying patients rather than systematic research. Empirical support for the existence of the proposed sequence of stages has been scant but intriguing.

One study followed 233 older adults over a 24-month period after the death of a loved one from natural causes. It assessed them on experiences associated with a modified version of Kübler-Ross’s stages. In accord with her theory, each of the five experiences peaked in the predicted order.

Disbelief was highest immediately after the loss and declined gradually thereafter. Yearning, anger and depression peaked at four, five and six months respectively before declining. Acceptance of the loss rose steadily over the two-year period.

Problems with the stage model

Although the sequence of peaks matched Kübler-Ross’s model, some aspects of this research also challenged it.

First, although disbelief was at its highest immediately after the loss, it was always less prominent than acceptance. Acceptance is not a late stage of resolution for people who are grieving, but an experience that prevails from the start and continues to grow.

Second, yearning was the most prominent negative experience, despite being omitted from the most well-known version of Kübler-Ross’s five stages. This points to the limitations of framing grief in the clinical terms of depression, which study participants experienced less frequently than longing.

But the study’s findings can’t necessarily be generalised as it looked only at older adults and natural causes of death. Another major study found the typical pattern of grieving among young adults was substantially different.

Read more: There’s not always ‘closure’ in the never-ending story of grief

Yearning peaked before disbelief, and depression remained constant without resolving over two years. In addition, yearning, anger and disbelief returned with a second peak near the two-year mark, when acceptance also declined.

Moreover, young adults whose loved ones died by violent causes differed from the typical pattern. For them, disbelief dominated their first months, and depression initially declined but then rose again as the second anniversary of the death approached.

All these findings represent the average responses of a sample rather than the trajectories of individual participants. Even if the Kübler-Ross’s stages partially reflect the statistical tendencies of the whole sample, they might fail to capture how individuals’ experiences of grief unfold.

That is the conclusion of a study that followed 205 adults over an 18-month period following the loss of a spouse. These adults had been interviewed for a related study prior to the loss.

The researchers found evidence of five distinct trajectories, with some people being depressed before the loss, and recovering afterwards. Some fell into a long-lasting depression, while others were fairly resilient and had experienced low levels of depression throughout.

Read more: Coping with bereavement and grief: lessons from history

States of grief

Kübler-Ross came to acknowledge the reality that her stages compose an appealing narrative of recovery rather than an accurate sequencing of grief. Experts now place less emphasis on her stages as a series of steps on the bereavement journey, much as they have tended to lose faith in other stage theories of human behaviour.

For all its limitations, Kübler-Ross’s analysis still has value. The supposed stages of grief may be better understood as states of grief: recognisable experiences that rise to the surface in distinctive ways in each person’s sorrowful passage through loss.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Whiteford, Professor, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University

In aged care in particular we’re spending A$1 billion extra, every year.

– Prime Minister Scott Morrison, doorstop interview, Guildford, Western Australia, October 2, 2018

Preparations for the Royal Commission into aged care are now underway, with Prime Minister Scott Morrison having warned Australians to brace themselves for “pretty bruising information” about the mistreatment of elderly people in the sector.

The Royal Commission will examine the quality and sufficiency of aged care services currently being provided – including a focus on evident substandard treatment, mistreatment, abuse and systemic failures – and the challenges facing the sector more broadly as Australia’s baby boomer population begins to require its services.

Opposition leader Bill Shorten said it wasn’t possible to “repair the system whilst you’re cutting it at the same time”, with the Labor leader and other MPs asserting the Coalition had made cuts of between A$1.2 billion and A$2 billion to aged care during Morrison’s time as Treasurer.

The Prime Minister rejected those accusations, saying the government was spending “A$1 billion extra, every year” on aged care.

Let’s look at the numbers.

Checking the source

The Conversation requested sources and comment from the Prime Minister’s office, but did not receive a response before publication.

Verdict

Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s statement that the Coalition is “spending A$1 billion extra, every year” on aged care is correct when spending is calculated in nominal terms (not adjusted for inflation).

Budget papers show that estimated nominal spending on aged care has risen by more than A$1 billion per year since financial year 2014-15, following the Coalition’s first budget in May 2014.

In real terms – adjusted for inflation – estimated spending on aged care increased by between A$679 million and A$796 million per year between 2014-15 and 2017-18.

Spending on aged care is projected to continue to increase by more than A$1 billion per year (in nominal terms) from 2017-18 to 2021-22.

Coalition spending on aged care

The Australian government is the primary funder and regulator of the aged care system, with care provided by a range of non-profit and private providers.

Budget papers show that estimated nominal spending on aged care (not adjusted for inflation) has risen by more than A$1 billion per year since financial year 2014-15, following the Coalition’s first budget in May 2014.

The table below shows estimates from each Budget of spending on aged care and services, including care and services for veterans, spending on nursing homes and other institutions, and community care services for older people, but excluding the aged pension and concessions.

In 2014-15, estimated spending was A$15.3 billion. This grew to an estimated A$18.4 billion in 2017-18.

In real terms – adjusted for inflation – estimated spending on aged care increased by between A$679 million and A$796 million per year between 2014-15 and 2017-18.

Here’s spending per person aged 85 and over:

Have there been cuts to aged care funding, as Labor claimed?

In the wake of the announcement of the Royal Commission into aged care, Opposition leader Bill Shorten said the current government had “cut A$2 billion, nearly, in aged care funding”.

Labor Senator Penny Wong, Shadow Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations Brendan O’Connor, Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, the Australian Council of Trade Unions and its Secretary Sally McManus, among others, pointed to a figure of A$1.2 billion in cuts from aged care during Scott Morrison’s time as treasurer.

Shadow Minister for Ageing and Mental Health, Julie Collins, said Morrison’s “$1.2 billion cut in the 2016 Budget came on top of the almost $500 million from aged care funding he cut in the 2015 MYEFO”.

Changes in funding outlined in 2015 MYEFO

In its 2015 Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook (MYEFO), the government did outline a range of policy decisions that had reduced spending in aged care funding.

One of these was changes to the Aged Care Funding Instrument – a measure used to assess the needs of aged care residents, and therefore how much funding the aged care providers receive as a result.

The government said it would refine the Aged Care Funding Instrument to “better align the funding claimed by providers to the level of care provided, through changes to the scoring matrix”. In other words, to make sure aged care providers weren’t receiving money for care that wasn’t required or being delivered.

The government said these changes were expected to reduce cash payments by A$472.4 million over three years to 2018‑19.

In addition, the 2015 MYEFO update noted that “improved compliance” around the provision of funding to residential aged care providers (including a focus on false claims) would lead to a net saving of A$61.9 million between 2015-16 and 2018-19.

The combination of the two initiatives were expected to lead to savings of A$534.3 million over four years.

But there were also increases in spending.

The 2015 MYEFO also noted that payments related to the Residential and Flexible Care program were rising, and were expected to:

… increase by A$162 million in 2015-16 (A$943 million over the four years to 2018 19), largely reflecting a higher than expected growth in care subsidies provided to residential aged care facilities.

Overall, the increase in payments to 2018-19 (A$943 million) was greater than the savings (A$534.3 million) over the same period.

Funding changes outlined in the 2016-17 Federal Budget

In the 2016-17 budget, the government said that by expanding on the refinements to the scoring matrix of the Aged Care Funding Instrument (outlined in MYEFO 2015-16), it would achieve savings of A$1.2 billion over four years.

(That’s the A$1.2 billion federal Labor and other groups were referring to.)

In addition, the government it would reduce indexation of the Complex Health Care component of the Aged Care Funding Instrument by 50% in 2016-17 (and establish a A$53.3 million transitional assistance fund to support providers).

The government said these measure were in response to continued higher than expected growth in spending on the Aged Care Funding Instrument, which had increased by a further A$2.5 billion over the forward estimates since the 2015‑16 MYEFO.

The next item in the Budget papers outlines higher spending for regional aged care facilities. The government said it would provide A$102.3 million over four years from 2016-17 to target the viability supplement (which address cost pressures experienced by residential care providers) more effectively to areas of greatest need.

The bottom line?

The claims that the Coalition has cut aged care spending do refer to specific saving initiatives the government has made, but they do not include other policy changes that have increased spending and variations in actual spending due to higher costs.

So while there have been decreases in aged care spending in some areas, the MYEFO and Budget papers show that these were made, in part, to offset increases in spending in other areas of aged care.

And when we look at the final figure, it shows that estimated spending on aged care has risen by more than A$1 billion per year since 2014-15, and is projected to continue to increase by more than A$1 billion per year from 2017-18 to 2021-22. – Peter Whiteford

Blind review

Politicians love to claim credit for spending more on things such as health and aged care, and it would be a rare year if more money was not spent, given the underlying economic and demographic dynamics.

Governments like to focus on inputs – such as spending – preferably not adjusted for inflation or population growth, as it makes the numbers bigger. Oppositions also like to focus on numbers – and often reductions in promised future spending – suggesting governments are chiselling consumers or the industry.

The Government is indeed spending more on aged care, as shown in this FactCheck. But although aged care spending has increased, it would have increased more but for the Government’s actions, as Labor has asserted. – Stephen Duckett

The Conversation’s FactCheck unit was the first fact-checking team in Australia and one of the first worldwide to be accredited by the International Fact-Checking Network, an alliance of fact-checkers hosted at the Poynter Institute in the US. Read more here.

Have you seen a “fact” worth checking? The Conversation’s FactCheck asks academic experts to test claims and see how true they are. We then ask a second academic to review an anonymous copy of the article. You can request a check at checkit@theconversation.edu.au. Please include the statement you would like us to check, the date it was made, and a link if possible.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anja Kanngieser, Vice Chancellor’s Research Fellow, University of Wollongong

International perceptions of the Pacific Island nation of Nauru are dominated by two interrelated stories. Until the turn of the century, it was the dramatic boom and bust of Nauru’s phosphate mine, and the mismanagement of its considerable wealth, that captured global attention.

Then, in 2001, Nauru become one of two Pacific sites for Australia’s offshore incarceration of asylum seekers and refugees. As money from the extraction of phosphate began to wane, Nauru became increasingly reliant on the income generated through the detention industry.

There is a third story that is often overlooked, one that will heavily determine the island’s future. Everyone on Nauru – Indigenous Nauruans and refugees alike – is experiencing the impacts of one the greatest social, economic and political threats faced by the world today: global environmental change.

Read more: The new rise of Nauru: can the island bounce back from its mining boom and bust?

I visited Nauru earlier this month as part of my project Climates of Listening, which amplifies Pacific calls for climate and environmental justice. I spoke with public servants, community leaders, and representatives of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) about their climate mitigation and adaptation strategies. I wanted to document the changes to the island’s reefs, lagoons and landscape, and also the community initiatives to cope with these changes.

Colonial legacy

Nauru was first colonised in the late 1800s by Germany, which aimed to exploit the island’s plentiful reserves of phosphate, a prized ingredient of fertiliser and munitions. In the early 1900s Britain brokered a deal with the German government and the Pacific Phosphate Company to begin large-scale mining, which became crucial for Australia and New Zealand, who were building up agricultural and military capacity.

After the first world war, Australia, Britain and New Zealand took over full trusteeship of the island, which served as a strategic military site and was successively occupied, costing many Indigenous lives. It was not until the late 1960s that Nauru finally regained independence and took over mining activities.

By this time there were already signs that accessible land would become an issue. Nauru is small, covering just 21 square km. The mine has taken over more than 80% of Nauru’s land, and although primary production is drawing to a close, the government is considering plans for secondary mining. That would extend extraction by around 20 years before phosphate is fully depleted and Nauru’s only exportable commodity is completely exhausted, although a possible new avenue has appeared in the form of deep seabed mining.

The mine area, called “topside” by Nauruans, is like a moonscape. Huge limestone pinnacles reach skywards, punctuated by steep gullies into which, I was warned, people have fallen to their deaths. It is unbearably hot, humid and inhospitable.

Shrinking habitable land means that most of Nauru’s growing population is clustered along the edges of the island. Around the north, coastal erosion eats away at the beach, leaving families with nowhere to go. While sea walls protect some areas, they push the waves onto others, meaning homes are flooded either way. Periodic king tides cover the only road running around the island, limiting accesses to services and resources.

Salt from the sea leaches into the groundwater supply. The water table is already contaminated with rubbish, mining effluent, and even leaks from cemeteries. While most of Nauru gets its water from the desalination plant, the delivery of the water can take a long time and when something goes wrong, experts have to be flown in to fix it. Rainwater is another option, but not everyone has a tank to catch it, and severe droughts are increasingly common.

Read more: How the entire nation of Nauru almost moved to Queensland

Despite the successful establishment of kitchen gardens, which feed several families, many people on the coast feel their soil is not adequate for growing food. Food is largely imported and I was told that there are long queues whenever a shipment of rice is due to arrive. In one supermarket, cucumbers sell for A$13 each, and a punnet of cherry tomatoes costs A$20. Most Nauruans cannot afford to buy fresh produce.

Compounding food insecurity are the depleting reef fish stocks, which the government is hoping to address through the eventual establishment of locally managed marine areas. There is a plan to rebuild milkfish supplies in people’s home ponds, a species endemic to the island. However, as the groundwater is contaminated, the fish will also become contaminated. If people use the fish to feed livestock, the contamination is passed up the food chain.

Dust from the mine still causes major respiratory issues. It covers houses near the harbour, where the phosphate is processed and shipped. Locals refer to it as “snow”.

Many people commented to me about how much hotter Nauru seems to be now, and fondly recalled the more clement weather they remembered from childhood. Today’s children don’t want to walk to school in the heat, and when they arrive their classrooms are not air-conditioned.

I was also told that the combination of mining, heat and erosion, as well as possible coral bleaching, is taking a toll on the island’s wildlife diversity. Usually, in the tropics, there is a cacophony of birdsong at dusk. But at one mine site I heard a single bird, despite an abundance of trees and shrubs.

Environmental officers further recounted that in early 2018 the reef was littered with sick fish, and that Nauru’s noddy birds – a popular food source – had contracted a mysterious and deadly virus. Curiously, there have also been recent sightings of orcas and a beached dugong, despite Nauru not being on any known migratory path.

Read more: Pacific nations aren’t cash-hungry, minister, they just want action on climate change

The many issues on Nauru add up to a grave threat to the island’s land, water and food security. While the idea of rehabilitating topside has been broached many times, there are no firm plans in place. This rehabilitation may be Nauru’s lifeline, given its precarious economic situation.

In order to fully understand the situation in Nauru, the climate impacts that everyone on the island is facing need to be addressed. The environmental disregard of wealthy nations hits frontline communities like Nauru first and, oftentimes, hardest.

The lives of those incarcerated on Nauru and of Indigenous Nauruans are all being detrimentally affected by choices that we, in Australia, make. This is true both in terms of allowing for human rights violations against asylum seekers and refugees, and in our continuing support for our national fossil fuel industry which is a massive contributor to global warming.

Australia plays a major role in the ongoing colonisation of the Pacific through aid, economics and security policies. It is our responsibility to push our governments to change Australia’s activities, and to support regional calls for self-determination and environmental justice.

We need to remember that Nauru wasn’t always like this. We helped make it what it is today.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Clarke, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, School of Social Science, The University of Queensland

Surveillance evokes fear of a “big brother” state watching our every move. The proliferation of closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras in our cities and the emergence of big data have only deepened this fear. Marginalised groups such as people sleeping rough feel the impact most acutely, as their lack of shelter exposes them to constant surveillance.

Our recent research investigated the role of surveillance in coordinating responses to homelessness in Cairns. Homelessness occurs here at twice the national rate.

For rough sleepers, being surveilled can result in unwanted questioning by police, being moved on, or even being arrested. We found, however, that surveillance was also used to coordinate genuinely supportive responses by local social services.

Researchers have linked surveillance of the homeless to efforts by public and other agencies to ensure city centres are attractive spaces for consumers, tourists and private investors. We found surveillance in Cairns is largely directed at reducing the impact of homelessness on the city’s image. This can result in people who are homeless being excluded from safe and familiar areas where they have ready access to support.

However, other researchers point out that responses to homelessness are diverse and multifaceted. Genuine attempts to help the homeless often exist alongside exclusionary practices. Despite this, little research has been done on how surveillance practices may interface with these more supportive initiatives.

We argue that the exclusionary effects of surveillance on the homeless are not a fait accompli. It is important to challenge these negative effects and to harness the potential for surveillance to contribute to social justice.

A tool to manage ‘antisocial behaviour’

Driven by concerns about the fragility of Cairns’ tourism-dependent economy, surveillance is indeed used to manage and clear public spaces of people seen as disrupting the city’s image as safe and inviting. People who are homeless are disproportionately surveilled.

Public debate on homelessness in Cairns often centres on “antisocial behaviour” by so-called “itinerant” Indigenous people from remote communities who sleep rough in the city. Local media, politicians and business owners publicly lament the impact on local commerce and efforts to promote Cairns as a welcoming place for visitors.

Acting on these concerns, local police, council and social service personnel work together to manage the behaviour of people sleeping rough. They do this either through enforcement – move-ons, seizing alcohol, arrest, and so one – or through efforts to remove the homeless from public view, such as taking them to the police watch house or local sobering-up facility.

Surveillance plays a key role in coordinating these activities. Information on the location and behaviour of homeless people is gleaned from council-operated CCTV cameras and foot patrols and passed on to police and other agencies.

Help with access to services and resources

Yet homelessness in Cairns is not only seen as a problem of antisocial behaviour. Community activists and social services highlight the social and economic forces driving homelessness. These range from unaffordable housing and barriers to accessing mainstream health and welfare services, to racism and the ongoing legacy of colonisation.

Indeed, even local politicians and council staff acknowledge that responses that move people on do not resolve the issues underlying their homelessness, which call for different approaches.

Reflecting these alternative views, Cairns has some important programs that help people overcome the practical, institutional and socio-economic barriers to exiting homelessness. For instance, the Cairns Street to Home program helps rough sleepers get into permanent housing. It also provides them with health care and (re)connects them to mainstream health and welfare institutions.

Importantly, these initiatives are supported by the same surveillance practices that coordinate the more disciplinary and exclusionary responses.

CCTV camera operators provide the location of rough sleepers to outreach workers seeking to engage new clients and support existing ones. The council also uses its surveillance capacities to help service providers locate rough sleepers who have no fixed address and often no phone in urgent situations, such as when they have a limited time to accept a social housing offer or are overdue for psychiatric medications.

Using surveillance for progressive ends

Our research shows that, as well as contributing to the policing and displacement of homelessness, surveillance can help overcome barriers that people face to accessing the resources they need to end their homelessness. This suggests that while surveillance comes with inherent dangers, such as the exclusion of marginalised groups, these are not necessary or essential functions.

Australian cities have invested extensive public resources in surveillance infrastructure. Greater effort should be made to harness these public assets to achieve positive social outcomes, such as enabling people who are homeless to find housing.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Prudence Gibson, Art writer and Tutor, UNSW

Review: David Goldblatt: Photographs 1948 – 2018, MCA Sydney.

Upon entering one of the smaller gallery spaces within this major survey exhibition of works by South African photographer David Goldblatt, the gallery attendant warns us that some viewers might find this particular series distressing.

We turn to the dark-haired, well-groomed woman standing next to us and say: “Have you ever seen photos of ex-offenders taken at the place they conducted their crimes?”

She turns to us, smiles, and says: “This is my father’s work. He did this series after he and my mother were attacked, once in the street and once at home. He wanted to meet these people, find out who they were.”

Like Goldblatt’s daughter Brenda and her family, very few South Africans are untouched by the violence that continues to plague the country.

The series Ex-Offenders is certainly troubling, but not for any explicit visual depiction of violence and crime. Instead, the black and white portraits of men and women convey a quiet earnestness. As if to contradict the calmness, the harrowing wall texts that accompany the images detail the circumstances of their criminal actions and subsequent experiences of incarceration.

Xolani Seko stands weeping outside the house where, in 1995, his erstwhile employer was accidentally killed after attempting sex with Xolani, East London. May 21 2016. silver gelatin photograph on fibre-based paper Image courtesy Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg and Cape Town, and Pace/MacGill, New York © The David Goldblatt Legacy Trust

In fact, following an historical tradition of social documentary photography, Goldblatt refrained from documenting chaotic scenes of violence and destruction, such as the devastating 1976 Soweto uprising where black student protests were met with deadly police gunfire. Instead, he focused his camera on the structural inequalities, everyday violence, poverty and racism of South African society both during and post-apartheid.

In these rooms of photographs, there is evidence of the hopes and inevitable failures of the apartheid era: street signs indicating racial division; the long bus trips of black workers commuting between the township of Soweto and the white city of Pretoria; the back-breaking labour of miners; black men clutching their “dompas” (government-issued passbooks); and the humble lives of the Indian and Malay community in Fietas who were forcibly removed in the 1970s to accommodate white people.

Young men with dompas (an identity document that every black South African had to carry), White City, Jabavu, Soweto 1972. silver gelatin photograph on fibre-based paper Image courtesy Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg and Cape Town © The David Goldblatt Legacy Trust

Goldblatt’s exhibition, curated by Rachel Kent, is consistently permeated with an empathetic kindness and sensitive calmness, which nevertheless exists within the confines of a morality minefield, where ethics are complicated and the observer is far from neutral.

In the vein of Lewis Hine, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and, more recently, Sebastião Salgado, Goldblatt (himself the grandson of persecuted Lithuanian Jews) was committed to documenting the lives of the less fortunate with the aim of shining a light on social injustice.

While this no doubt required empathy, relatability and even courage at times, it must also bear the indelible burden of the white, privileged gaze – a point we make less as a criticism of Goldblatt and more to underline the construction of his work.

Who will be remembered as the hero?

Considering the wealth of feminist and neo/post-colonial scholarship, this is not a new issue, but it always raises the question – who gets to tell the story? Who gets to go down as hero in history – the writer or the written? The photographer or the photographed? It is part of a common colonial story.

Shop assistant, Orlando West, 1972 silver gelatin photograph on fibre-based paper. Image courtesy Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg and Cape Town © The David Goldblatt Legacy Trust

In an effort to remain “true” to the solemnity of apartheid, Goldblatt rarely photographed his subjects in colour, considering the rich contrast afforded by black and white photography more appropriate. However, by the early 1990s, he increasingly used colour and larger-format prints, which (not coincidentally) corresponded with the end of apartheid policies and the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994.

In fact, Goldblatt photographed Mandela. The photographic session took place at 5am. Mandela’s minders wanted him posed in his living-room chair but Goldblatt insisted on a high-backed kitchen chair, in order to impart a distinguished air to the image.

Despite Goldblatt’s turn to colour, the later photographs are far from a garish or naïve celebration of post-apartheid life. The series In the Time of AIDS, exhibited in the more cavernous spaces of the MCA, is subdued in muted greyish tones.

The motif of a red ribbon, intended to stand out and raise awareness of HIV/AIDS, instead blends with the rural landscapes to function as an indictment of the virus’s ubiquitous presence in everyday life. Goldblatt likened the ribbon to a “stale advertisement for an unwanted product”.

In a contemporary culture that is saturated with images of death, homelessness and war, it is perhaps the quiet stillness of Goldblatt’s photographs that make them a little unnerving. Perhaps it is the way the subjects directly meet our viewer-gaze that makes us feel complicit in the acts perpetrated against them.

Perhaps it is the brutality, behind the images but never fully extrapolated, that makes us a little uncomfortable, or a little plagued by white guilt? And yes, this no doubt is the point of Goldblatt’s life’s work: to insist that we do not look away and pretend it didn’t happen.

David Goldblatt: Photographs 1948-2018 is exclusive to the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia running from October 19 to March 3 2019.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

Fittingly, given the perennial instability of federal politics, the Wentworth byelection looked clearcut on Saturday night only to become very murky on Sunday morning.

As things stand, although a lot of postals are still outstanding, independent Kerryn Phelps is expected to take the seat and the Coalition is poised to go into minority government, and potentially to descend into yet more infighting on the way to se bvemingly inevitable defeat next year.

In Wentworth Phelps’ support appears to have strengthened late. She improved her messaging, while the government’s shambles last week reinforced in voters’ mind why it needed a walloping.

Regardless of the narrowing in the count, the top line message is that these voters shouted their outrage at the political assassination of Malcolm Turnbull. They also strongly signalled they care about climate change and are not satisfied at the government’s policy response; as well, they want something done about the offshore refugees who have been treated inhumanely for so long.

Defenders of the leadership switch will say Wentworth isn’t Australia, voters elsewhere won’t feel so strongly, and Scott Morrison cuts through better than Turnbull.

But a large number of Australians are disgusted with the expedient coup culture that has overtaken our politics. As Liberal candidate Dave Phelps told Sky on Sunday, “Australians are sick of this [instability]”. The Coalition can’t avoid paying a price for that at the election – the question is only how high a one.

To think that the Nationals could be even remotely contemplating a coup by Barnaby Joyce against Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack shows that some politicians find it hard to learn the most basic lessons.

McCormack is lack lustre but cutting him down would be simply to court danger. Not least, some rural women are so against Joyce that the party might face active opposition from them. Yet, Nationals sources still don’t rule out a move before Christmas.

As for Morrison, as much as bringing him new problems, Wentworth has put up in lights the ones that were already there.

Even if those in other electorates are not as agitated about climate change as Wentworthians, that issue is more important to the broad Australian community than it is to the government.

Morrison may have held the line against the right wing Liberals arguing for quitting the Paris agreement but he errs by brushing away people’s concerns about climate change with his singleminded focus on power prices. Many voters won’t see that approach as adequate.

Morrison remains wedged between his Liberal right wing ideologues and mainstream voters. The right claims to speak for the “mainstream” on climate (and other things) but it doesn’t.

Morrison needs a way out – to show that he understands a more sophisticated policy is required – but none is in sight.

Liberal deputy leader Josh Frydenberg was holding firmly to present policies on Sunday, even though he has previously admitted his bitter disappointment at the death of the National Energy Guarantee, which in its totality integrated energy and climate policy.

The story is a little more positive on the refugees. Finally, the government shows a willingness to settle some in New Zealand, but it demands that Labor pass the legislation to close the “back door” to stop these people (and boat people settled elsewhere) ever setting foot in Australia. Labor says such a ban is too wide but the pressure is on for a deal. One “push” factor is that progress on a New Zealand solution, albeit partial, would take some weight off Bill Shorten at Labor’s December national conference.

A hung parliament, assuming it happens, will make everything harder for the government, including building a platform for the election. To pass any controversial legislation, it would have to get the support of at least one of six crossbenchers. The crossbenchers will exploit their enhanced importance.

Generally, risks will be higher. The possibility of a successful no confidence motion is remote. But Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton might be a little more nervous about the chances of his eligibility to sit in parliament being referred to the High Court.

The government’s worsened situation may impose more discipline on its backbenchers – or it may encourage backbench grandstanding in the pursuit of survival.

Coming up on the policy front is the issue of the response to the religious freedom report. Here Morrison is on a hiding to nothing. His right wing wants more religions protections to be legislated. But in the run up to Wentworth he had to promise legislation to remove the existing right of religious schools to discriminate against gay students – and he is resisting calls to do the same for teachers. The religious freedom debate is going in quite another direction to that foreseen by the right and Morrison himself.

Morrison would do better to simply bury the (still unreleased) report. But the right won’t allow that.

Then there is the Middle East policy U-turn Morrison put on the table in the campaign’s last week – to consider shifting the Australian embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. A decision is due by year’s end. Is Morrison going to stick to this controversial path – or make an ungainly retreat? Either way, there’ll be a fresh argument.

After the Wentworth debacle Turnbull’s critics predictably are intensifying their attack on him – firstly for jumping ship ahead of the election and secondly for his failure to intervene to help Sharma. Both Morrison and Sharma appealed to Turnbull personally to come to the aid of the party.

Turnbull can say he made it clear he would quit parliament if rolled, and that ex-PMs shouldn’t hang about. The former prime minister can argue that weighing into the campaign would have been viewed cynically and would be counterproductive.

If, however, Sharma misses out by a relatively modest margin, the question will hang in the air: might Turnbull have swung a few votes? His decisions will seen even by some of his supporters as on the negative side of his legacy ledger.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Beaumont, Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Melbourne

On Sunday morning, independent Kerryn Phelps leads the Liberals in the Wentworth byelection by a 50.6-49.4 margin, a swing against the Liberals of 18.4% since the 2016 election. Primary votes were 43.0% for the Liberals’ Dave Sharma (down 19.3%), 29.3% Phelps, 11.5% for Labor’s Tim Murray (down 6.2%) and 8.6% Greens (down 6.3%).

Early on election night, it appeared certain the Liberals would lose. After 11pm, pre-poll booths dramatically narrowed Phelps’ margin from 54.4-45.6 to 51.9-48.1. In particular, the Rose Bay pre-poll booth gave Sharma almost 70% after preferences, with over 6,400 formal votes at that booth. Almost 5,200 formal postals then split to Sharma by 64.4-35.6, reducing Phelps’ lead to her current 884 vote margin. Two hospital booths counted Sunday morning also damaged Phelps.

Another 1,266 postals are awaiting processing, and probably another 4,000 will arrive by the deadline for postal votes reception on November 2. If Sharma’s dominance with postals continues, he could win Wentworth after it was called for Phelps early on election night. In byelections, there are very few votes other than postals to be counted after election day; in general elections, Liberals usually perform badly on absent votes.

Analyst Kevin Bonham has identified two discrepancies in election-day booths where Phelps performed much worse on preferences than expected, given primary votes at those booths. If these booths are corrected in Phelps’ favour, she will gain enough votes to offset the postals, but there may be other errors that assist Sharma. Election-night figures will be carefully rechecked over the next few days.

If corrections to the election-night count favour Phelps, she is very likely to win. If there is no substantial correction or corrections cancel out, Sharma is about a 60% chance to win, given his dominance on postals, of which there are probably about 5,000 left to count.

Wentworth has existed since Federation, and had always been held by the Liberals or their conservative predecessors. The loss of Wentworth would deprive the Coalition of its parliamentary majority, and is thus more important than the average byelection, where the government’s majority is not threatened, allowing voters to lodge a protest vote without risking the government.

On early counting figures, there were many media commentators talking about a “record” swing against the Liberals. Bonham said that, though the swings were large, they were not a record even at that time. Talking about a “two party” swing against the Liberals is wrong, because Labor did not make the final two at this byelection.

The Poll Bludger has details of the five Wentworth ReachTEL polls, taken from August 27, three days after the change of PM, to October 15. These polls were conducted for various left-wing groups. In the August 27 poll, Sharma had 34.6% of the primary vote, but recovered to 43.0% on September 27, before slumping back to 33.4% on October 15.

Phelps had 22.5% on September 17, but slumped to 16.7% on October 2, then recovered to 26.3% on October 15. Murray was up to 25.7% on October 2, but fell back to 22.0% on October 15.

Given the disparity between the pre-poll and postal votes and election-day votes, it is likely that polling throughout the Wentworth campaign understated the Liberals’ vote; seat polls are notoriously unreliable. The Liberals’ bad parliamentary week resulted in a worse election-day performance, but pre-poll and postal votes were not as affected by last week.

Media expectations were that if Phelps made the final two, she could defeat Sharma. If Murray made the final two, Sharma would win. As a result, people who wanted Sharma defeated switched to Phelps. The electoral commission will do a two-party count between Sharma and Murray, but probably not for at least two weeks. Sharma will win this count, vindicating the switch to Phelps.

Turnbull’s personal vote was probably worth about ten points to the Liberals in Wentworth. After a large fall following Turnbull’s exit, the Liberals’ primary vote was improving in ReachTEL polls of Wentworth before the events of the last two weeks appeared to push it down again.

Read more: Poll wrap: Worst reaction to midterm PM change in Newspoll history; contrary polls in Dutton’s Dickson

On my personal website, I said that the Coalition under Scott Morrison could have problems among better-educated voters, and that Morrison’s social conservatism would not appeal to an electorate that voted Yes to same-sex marriage by an 81-19 margin, the fourth highest vote for SSM in a federal seat.

Electorates like Wentworth have voted Liberal for economic reasons even though they are socially progressive. If the Liberals lose Wentworth, it would be because they had appeared to become too socially conservative and too sceptical of climate change action under Morrison. Phelps was a good fit for Wentworth, being economically conservative but socially progressive.

US midterm elections update

I wrote for The Poll Bludger on Friday about the November 6 US midterm elections. Democrats are likely to win the House, but Republicans are likely to retain the Senate. Trump’s ratings have improved.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stuart Worboys, Laboratory and Technical Support Officer, Australian Tropical Herbarium, James Cook University

Sign up to the Beating Around the Bush newsletter here, and suggest a plant we should cover at batb@theconversation.edu.au.

The 1800s was a time of colonial expansion across the globe. During this time the great and the good of Britain filled their grand gardens with exotic novelties from all corners of the world.

Amongst these were many species of Asian rhododendron, a diverse and colourful genus of shrubs and small trees, whose high altitude origins made them well suited to the cool temperate climate of England and Scotland.

Read more: The road to here: rivers were the highways of Australia’s colonial history

Throughout the 19th century, commercial collectors and field naturalists discovered rhododendron species in southern China, the Himalayas, on the high peaks of Borneo, Java and especially New Guinea.

These finds lead Victoria’s government botanist of the time, Ferdinand von Mueller, to speculate about finding rhododendrons on the high tropical mountains on the northeast coast of Queensland. He wrote:

When in 1855 [I] saw… the bold outlines of Mount Bellenden-Ker, the highest mount of tropical Australia, towering to 5,000 feet, [I] was led to think, that the upper region might prove to be the home of species of Rhododendron… forms of plants characteristic of cool Malayan sylvan regions.

But the lofty heights of Mt Bellenden Ker were unknown to European Australians. It would be another 32 years before an expedition led by naturalist W.A. Sayer reached its central peak.

Sayer’s expedition, accompanied by two indigenous assistants, reached the mountain’s high ridge after several mishap-filled attempts. It was here they confirmed Mueller’s suspicions. Sayer’s account of its discovery is interesting:

The top of the range is razor-backed, and on travelling along the range beyond the spur by which we ascended, I could not see the sides, they being, if anything, hanging over. We tumbled rocks over, but could not hear them fall.

It was here that I observed the Rhodendron Lochae growing, and asked the Kanaka to get it; but he remarked, ‘S’pose I fall, I no see daylight any more; I go bung altogether;’ so I had to get it myself.

Mueller received the hard-won specimens and named the species Rhododendron lochae (later corrected to R. lochiae) after Lady Loch, the wife of the Victorian Governor.

Since then, rhododendron plants have been found on nine peaks and tablelands in the Wet Tropics region of north Queensland. Populations on peaks south of Cairns are called Rhododendron lochiae, whilst plants growing on mountains to the north of Cairns are considered by some to be a distinct species: Rhododendron viriosum.

Both northern and southern plants are straggly shrubs that grow in thin soils or rock cracks, sometimes in open cloud-swept boulder fields, sometimes in deep shade along creeks, or rarely as epiphytes on moss-covered trees. They produce bunches of gloriously red, bell-shaped flowers, followed by dry brown capsules filled with small winged seeds that are apparently spread by wind.

They grow slowly but with relative ease from cuttings, and are often cultivated in gardens and nurseries in temperate Australia. However, over time knowledge of the precise origin of these cultivated plants has been lost, which means they are unsuitable for detailed scientific investigations.

All of Australia’s rhododendron populations are located at altitudes above 950m in National Parks within the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area. Most are difficult to access, requiring arduous climbs on rough foot tracks through leech-infested rainforest. And yet, although isolated in protected areas, they are threatened by human activities: loss of habitat due to climate change.

Recent climate modelling research published by scientists from James Cook University and the CSIRO predicts significant reductions in suitable habitat for a suite of mountaintop flora species in Australia’s tropics (our rhododendrons were not included in the analysis, but occupy the habitats assessed).

The habitat of many of these species is predicted to disappear altogether well before the end of the century.

Using rhododendron as a model, the Australian Tropical Herbarium at James Cook University is working to save these threatened species through “ex situ” conservation – cultivation in temperate zone public gardens, well outside their natural range. Because the threatening process – climate change – is not readily mitigated, establishing precautionary ex situ collections is the only viable conservation intervention for these plants.

With funding from the Australian Rhododendron Society Victoria Branch and the Ian Potter Foundation, and the support of traditional owners, Queensland National Parks and the Wet Tropics Management Authority, we have mounted expeditions to collect samples from most of the known populations.

These expeditions have put expert naturalists into rarely visited and challenging environments. Beyond gathering rhododendron samples, new moss species have been discovered and are being named, a fern previously thought extinct was rediscovered, and beautiful little epiphytic orchids have been found on a mountain where they’d not previously been recorded. Golden bower-bird bowers have been mapped in remote mountain rainforests, and a likely new species of snail has been discovered.

Read more: The best time to water your plants during a heatwave

Australia now has a well-documented and genetically diverse collection of native rhododendron plants thriving in the Dandenong Ranges Botanic Garden.

We plan to expand this work, ensuring the preservation and public display of rhododendron and many other mountain species threatened by climate change.

Sign up to Beating Around the Bush, a series that profiles native plants: part gardening column, part dispatches from country, entirely Australian.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jana Perkovic, Sessional lecturer and researcher, University of Melbourne

Review: A Quiet Evening of Dance, Melbourne Festival

The program booklet for William Forsythe’s A Quiet Evening of Dance has an entire paragraph in the choreographer’s biography dedicated to listing his lifetime achievement awards – such is the stature of this man. It wasn’t always so.

Forsythe’s work was consistently controversial (particularly in his native United States), from the time he took over the artistic direction of Frankfurt Ballet in the 1984 until well after he left it to run his own, rigorously experimental Forsythe Company.

His choreographies were (and are) difficult, formally experimental to the absolute extreme, breaking both with the pleasing aesthetics of ballet and with the humanist bent of modern dance. The titles of his works are representative of his disinterest in playing by the book: consider In The Middle, Somewhat Elevated (1987); Limb’s Theorem (1990), and One Flat Thing, Reproduced (2008). A review in LA Times in 1991 referred to him as “arguably the most controversial choreographer in international ballet”. In 2005, police raided his house after he presented a choreography that critiqued the war in Iraq.

The last ten or so years have seen Forsythe’s repertoire of key pieces reappraised with a vengeance. It is not entirely clear how this happened – and even the choreographer himself has spoken in amused tones about it. It is possible that time has lent clarity to his formal brilliance, or that his harsh, techno-cerebral aesthetic seems less unapproachable in the era of backyard drones. Either way, today, Forsythe is considered one of the greats of contemporary dance.

Specifically, of ballet. This is an important and unusual distinction to make, because what we call “ballet” and what we call “contemporary dance” have been in philosophical opposition for at least the past 50-odd years. Contemporary dance has developed as a rebellion against the rigidity of ballet training, techniques and aesthetics, and today the two communities of dancers, institutions, and audiences coexist without a great deal of overlap.

Read more: Tree of Codes wields dance, music and art to create new spectacle

Contemporary dance training is looser than the absolutely codified positions of ballet: dancers and choreographers come from all backgrounds, including street dance, and late bloomers are not unusual (unlike ballet, in which an early start is still a must). Forsythe, whose work is revered for its innovative and challenging nature, is a rare figure in contemporary dance to have maintained an absolute allegiance to classical ballet institutions, techniques and dancers. He classically trained and danced with Joffrey Ballet and Stuttgart Opera before he became a choreographer; and all but ten years of his long choreographic career have been spent within ballet institutions.

This long preamble is to say: however jagged, industrial and shapeless an evening of Forsythe choreography may seem to an eye used to Odette/Odile from Swan Lake, it is always grounded in ballet. “I feel like a native ballet speaker,” the choreographer has said. The vast experimentation with bodily organisation, composition, structure, that animates Forsythe’s work, unfolds through the vocabulary of five positions, pliés, and Petipa.

A Quiet Evening of Dance is a curated program of short pieces that premiered earlier this month at Sadler’s Wells in London and De Singel in Antwerp before coming to Melbourne Festival. Some of the pieces included in the program are old, others are newly created.

Dialogue (DUO2015) was originally an all-female duet created in 1996, re-choreographed in 2015 for Sylvie Gillem’s farewell program, and here re-offered on two male dancers. The impetus for the program was to give a longer shelf life to this virtuosic, but light-hearted choreography that borders on slapstick, in which two men circle each other, mimic each other’s movements, trip, fall, stand up. The delivery is easy: when something is done with great skill, it appears as if it’s done without effort. That’s because it’s done with skill, and not effort.

DUO2015, the centrepiece of the first half of the performance, is prefaced with a tryptich (Prologue-Catalogue-Epilogue). The three short works, performed to not much more than birdsong and silence, serve almost as a primer to the rest of the evening. The first is a pas de deux in blacks and long white gloves, drawing all the attention to the dancers’ expressive arms, as if they were mimes.

In the second, Jill Johnson and Christopher Roman, two fantastically skilled and surprisingly mature dancers, provide almost a mechanical sketch of ballet, by systematically performing the folding and unfolding of joints (shoulders, elbows, wrists), pressure points, counterpoint, balance, swivel. It is like a lesson in the mechanics of ballet.

This becomes significant in the Epilogue, which introduces more complex geometries and human configurations, as well as the equally rigid vocabulary of break-dancing through the appearance of Rauf “Rubber Legz” Yasit, frequent Forsythe collaborator. The juxtaposition foregrounds the similarities of the two systems of movement; but more importantly, it foregrounds their nature as systems, their mathematics.

Act 2 is an entirely new piece, Seventeen / Twenty-One which continues the same break-down of ballet to its most basic constituent elements, through juxtaposition with the movement sequences of break-dancing, but this time to a Baroque composition by Jean-Philippe Rameau. The effect is of a magic trick: the curtain fall and reveal.

Forsythe’s sparse, precise, denim-and-sneakers minimal choreography is now the 17th-century pas de troix, as courtly and codified as the Versailles of the Sun King. In one truly splendid moment, Yasit crosses the stage in a sequence of superbly executed street moves. Two of the ballet dancers look at him, point, turn away elegantly, like fauns in early ballet, only in jeans. The music gives a sense of rhythm, phrasing, tone and emotional narrative to the same choreographic movement that in Act 1 came across as dry, theoretical exercises. It is as if Forsythe has just shown us how it’s all done.

Both ballet lovers and ballet haters tend to associate the form with its Romantic period, Petipa and Tschaikovsky. But the immovable forms of this rigid dancing vocabulary were codified two centuries earlier, in the Baroque period. Pierre Beauchamps, Louis XIV’s dance teacher, codified the five positions of what was then still a dance of kings. Jennifer Homans in her recent book Apollo’s Angels refers to this moment as ballet’s “crucial leap from etiquette to art.”

It was the time of the first development of modern science, of modern mechanics, of Voltaire and Descartes, of Enlightenment and of the first modern Constitution, a time that loved maths, structure and harmony. The exceptional longevity of ballet has preserved in its forms the DNA of that time. A Quiet Evening of Dance is Forsythe’s excavation of some of this history – surprising, amusing, but precise.

A Quiet Evening of Dance is being staged as part of the Melbourne Festival until October 20.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tim Doherty, Research Fellow, Deakin University

The dingo is Australia’s largest land-based predator, occurring across most of the mainland and on many nearshore islands.

Our new research, published in the journal Mammal Review, reveals the breadth and diversity of dingo diets across the continent.

We compiled and analysed 73 sets of data, containing details of more than 32,000 dingo droppings or stomach contents, to document the range of different species that dingoes eat, and how their diets vary between different environments.

A wide-ranging diet

We found that dingoes eat at least 229 vertebrate species. This includes 62 small mammals (less than 500 grams in mass), 79 medium-sized and larger mammals, 10 species of hoofed mammals, 50 birds and 26 reptiles. Dingoes also eat insects, crustaceans, centipedes, fish and frogs.

The true number of species is likely to be much higher because dingo diets have been poorly studied in many parts of Australia, such as Cape York Peninsula.

Read more: Dingoes do bark: why most dingo facts you think you know are wrong

Large (at least 7kg) and medium-sized (0.5-6.9kg) mammals were the most common components of dingo diets, followed by small mammals, rabbits, arthropods, reptiles, birds and hoofed animals.

A range of introduced pest species also feature in dingo diets, including deer, goats, rabbits, hares, black rats, house mice, foxes and cats. In recent decades, the occurrence of sambar deer in dingo diets has increased as this invasive species has expanded its range.

Dingoes also eat sheep and cattle, although dietary samples are unable to distinguish between predation and scavenging, and hence tell us little about dingo impacts on livestock production. Dietary samples also do not reveal instances of dingoes killing livestock without eating them.

Regional variation

We found that what dingoes eat depends on where they live. For instance, in arid central Australia, birds, reptiles, rabbits, small mammals and insects form major parts of dingo diets. In contrast, these food groups are less important in temperate and subtropical eastern Australia, where medium-sized and large mammals such as kangaroos, bandicoots and possums are more important.

The higher occurrence of medium-sized mammals in dingo diets in eastern Australia may be due to the lower extinction rates of native mammals there. In contrast, central Australia is a global mammal extinction hotspot, which probably accounts for the low occurrence of medium-sized mammals in dingo diets in arid and semi-arid areas.

Nonetheless, one medium-sized mammal was a major food item for dingoes in arid areas: the European rabbit. In some areas, more than 50% of dingo droppings or stomachs contained the remains of this invasive species. It is possible that native medium-sized mammals previously constituted a major part of dingo diets in arid Australia, but have since been replaced by rabbits.

Local prey availability plays a major role in determining what dingoes eat. For instance, in the Tanami Desert, reptiles were most common in dingo diets during warmer months when they are most active. However, very few studies have collected data on prey availability, partly because of the sheer number of different animals that dingoes eat.

Threatened species

Dingoes kill or eat at least 39 native species that are classed as threatened or near-threatened on the IUCN Red List. These include the northern quoll, golden bandicoot and bridled nailtail wallaby.

This tally is higher than the number of threatened species in feral cat diets (based on a previous study that used similar methods), even though cats eat almost twice as many different species overall as dingoes (400 and 229, respectively).

Read more: Why the WA government is wrong to play identity politics with dingoes

Today’s threatened native species co-existed with dingoes for a long time before European colonisation, which means they were able to withstand dingo predation without going extinct.

But now a combination of small population sizes of some threatened species and exacerbating factors such as habitat loss, foxes and cats means some threatened species could be vulnerable to even low levels of dingo predation. Predation by dingoes should therefore be a key consideration when attempting to conserve or restore threatened species.

Dietary studies are one way we can understand how dingoes interact with other species. Our study also highlights that we still have much to learn about our native top predator. In many parts of Australia, the favourite foods of dingoes are still a mystery.

The authors acknowledge the contribution of Naomi Davis, Dave Forsyth, Mike Letnic, Russell Palmer, Joe Benshemesh, Glenn Edwards, Jenny Lawrence, Lindy Lumsden, Charlie Pascoe, Andy Sharp, Danielle Stokeld, Cecilia Myers, Georgeanna Story, Paul Story, Barbara Triggs, Mark Venosta and Mike Wysong to this research.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Samantha Hepburn, Director of the Centre for Energy and Natural Resources Law, Deakin Law School, Deakin University

“Did you think to yourself that taking money to which there was no entitlement raised a question of the criminal law?” Commissioner Kenneth Hayne asked Nicole Smith, who resigned as chair of NAB’s superannuation trustee, NULIS, a little more than a month before she fronted the banking royal commission.

“I didn’t,” Smith replied.

Smith’s evidence related to NAB skimming A$87 million from superannuation accounts by charging 220,000 members “service fees” for which no service was provided. As head of the board of the superannuation trustee, it was Smith’s job to act solely in the best interests of the members. Instead she acted in the best interests of NAB.

Her admissions and the evidence from the royal commission that more than $A1 billion has been taken from superannuation accounts for no service show we need better supervision of the trustees who oversee more than A$2.7 trillion in superannuation assets.

As senior counsel assisting the commission Michael Hodge put it:

Trustees are surrounded by temptation, to preference the interests of their sponsoring organisations, to act in the interests of other parts of their corporate group, to choose profit over the interests of members, and to establish structures that consign to others the responsibility for the fund and thereby relieve the trustee of visibility of anything that might be troubling.

The entrenched practice of retail super funds using superannuation trust funds as profit-making enterprises undermines the integrity of the whole superannuation sector. Focused regulatory action and oversight are imperative to protect it.

Super duties

Super trustees are subject to a range of stringent duties.

There are “equitable” duties, which arise from trustees being fiduciaries – responsible for acting in the best interests of the owners of the assets they manage. As fiduciaries, super trustees must avoid conflicts of interest and account for any profit they make.

As trustees specifically, they must act in the best interests of the beneficiaries and exercise powers conferred to them as trustees (trust powers) with real and genuine consideration.

All trustees are legally obliged to act in the best interests of the people whose money they are entrusted with. Superannuation trustees have an even greater obligation, because of the social importance of superannuation. The High Court has ruled that public expectations mean superannuation trustees have “more intense” obligations than other private trusts.

This is underlined by the “statutory” duties of the Superannuation Industry (Supervision) Act 1993. It states directors of corporate superannuation trusts must perform their duties in the best interests of their beneficiaries, superannuation fund members.

The act also establishes supervision and oversight of super trustees by the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA), the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) and the Commissioner of Taxation.

Irregular regulation

Yet clearly this oversight has been failing. The evidence from the royal commission is that many super trustees having been ignoring their duties. They have gone along with rubber-stamping unjustifiable fees purely because their parent institutions wanted the money.

In 2017 the prudential regulator was given the power to directly disqualify directors of superannuation trustee corporations. It already had the power to do so by applying to the Federal Court. Over the past decade, however, it has sought just one disqualification.

The regulator’s deputy chair, Helen Rowell, has argued this is due to APRA trying to protect the public interest, avoiding the risk of a run on a fund. But its inaction has arguably emboldened super trustees to ignore their duties because of the low risk of being penalised.

Read more: Has APRA just outsourced its job?

Previous reform proposals

The royal commission may result in criminal charges against banks and financial institutions. One outcome that must come is stronger oversight of super trustees.

Federal parliament already has before it amendments to the Superannuation Industry (Supervision) Act that include requiring individual super trustees to make annual written assessments about whether fees serve the interests of members. However, the bill has reportedly been shelved.

It is therefore critical the royal commission recommend strong action, including reforms proposed by previous inquiries into the financial services sector.

Read more: The problem with Australia’s banks is one of too much law and too little enforcement

These include the Financial System Inquiry, which recommended in 2015 that super funds must have a majority of independent directors on their trustee boards. It also proposed new civil and criminal penalties for directors failing to act in the best interests of fund members.

Additional reforms might include:

• establishing a specific conduct regulator for corporate superannuation trustees

• making it mandatory for ASIC to prosecute superannuation trustees and related entities (such as banks) for duty breaches, with much higher penalties

• stronger oversight over responsibilities that corporate trustees outsource to third parties

• mandatory reporting of corporate fee structures, with regular review to determine if these are justified.

The trust remains the most appropriate legal mechanism to manage savings accumulated over a long time. Much stronger behavioural controls and civil penalties are necessary to ensure super trustees act honestly and in good faith for the benefit of the beneficiaries. That they are, in short, trustworthy.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Richard Shaw, Professor of Politics, Massey University

Shortly before last years’s general election in Aotearoa New Zealand, a Morrinsville farmer protesting the then opposition Labour Party’s planned water tax held up a placard describing its newly minted leader, Jacinda Ardern, as a “pretty communist”.

A year on, Ardern is New Zealand’s prime minister, the third woman and the youngest person to have held the role in 150 years. She is comfortably the most popular politician in the land, and one of the brightest stars in the international political firmament.

The Labour-New Zealand First-Green coalition government led by Ardern celebrates its first birthday this week.

Read more: Jacinda Ardern to become NZ prime minister following coalition announcement

It has been quite the year for Ardern. It is worth reiterating just how far she has travelled since she took the reins as Labour’s leader just weeks before the election, igniting a dull campaign and resuscitating Labour’s polling.

A contemporary politician

Following the election, the conservative National Party looked odds-on to retain office. But on 19 October, after almost two weeks of negotiations, the leader of the centre-right New Zealand First (NZF) party, Winston Peters, surprised virtually everyone (including Labour’s front bench) when he used the balance of power to form a government with Labour and the Greens.

In the year since, Ardern has firmly established herself as the government’s and her party’s most valuable political asset. In an ironic turn of events, Andrew Little, the man who voluntarily stood aside so Ardern could become Labour leader, is also performing well.

An astute and effective political communicator, Ardern regularly uses Facebook Live to apprise the nation of the contents of a day in the life of the PM. The formal set pieces that have helped established Ardern as the dominant figure on New Zealand’s political landscape include her speaking on the lower marae at Waitangi, the spiritual birthplace of the nation, wearing a Māori korowai while meeting New Zealand’s head of state, and taking a seat in the United Nations General Assembly with her child, Neve Te Aroha, and partner, Clarke Gayford.

The informal, popular-culture moments – particularly those mediated by social media – have been just as important and reflect how Ardern occupies political time and space in a way no previous New Zealand prime minister has. She and Gayford have used Twitter to announce Ardern’s pregnancy, triggering stiff nationwide competition for the role of official babysitter. Social media also charted the birth of their child in a public hospital, the PM’s taste for mac’n’cheese, and the creation of a special UN pass for Neve Te Aroha.

But swooning international audiences do not vote in Aotearoa New Zealand, and what plays well on the Colbert Show does not necessarily resonate in quite the same way back home.

Not all smooth sailing

It is important to note that National continues to outpoll Labour on the preferred party vote. At times the political management of the coalition has been shoddy. Ardern has already had to relieve two members of her cabinet – Clare Curran and Meka Whaitiri – of their ministerial duties, to the disappointment of those hoping to see more, not fewer, women at the top table.

Ardern has also been criticised for not taking a stronger stand on the plight of refugees and on questions concerning possible Chinese involvement in domestic politics. While the government has established many reviews, it is taking some time for the material achievements to start racking up.

But there are signs the administration is starting to hit its straps. Finance Minister Grant Robertson recently announced a larger than expected budget surplus, thus meeting his promised public debt/GDP ratio four years ahead of schedule.

Since Ardern’s return from the UN, Peters and his New Zealand First party colleagues have looked uncharacteristically focused, although the call at the party’s recent conference for a Respecting New Zealand Values Bill was quickly slapped down by Ardern.

Meanwhile, the opposition National party is spiralling into nasty internecine strife that has gone global, may cost the party its leader, and will almost certainly damage its polling.

Changing the culture of politics

Standing back from the detail, what can be said about the political landscape in Aotearoa New Zealand one year on from the formation of the first Labour-NZF-Greens coalition? For one thing, on this side of the ditch we are cautiously re-familiarising ourselves with the idea that the state can be a force for good. The results at this early stage are patchy, as you would expect, but this administration’s belief that government can be benign rather than benighted feels new and different.

Second, Ardern is normalising a whole bunch of things. Being a prime minister and a new mum, breastfeeding at work, and having a male partner who is a primary carer are all becoming, well, just normal.

Third, our cultural politics are changing. Not quickly enough, to be sure, but the symbolism of the fact that Ardern and Gayford’s child carries a Māori name and will be raised speaking both te reo Māori and English has been lost on precisely no-one in this country.

Finally, the nation’s political stocks in the international arena are appreciating. That is no bad thing for a small, exporting nation. There is a powerful progressive-egalitarian narrative in New Zealand reaching back through the nation’s anti-nuclear stance in the mid-1980s to the achievement (or granting) of women’s suffrage in 1893.

Read more: Why New Zealand was the first country where women won the right to vote

As is the case with all political narratives, this one obscures as much as it reveals. But in an age of international fear and loathing, many New Zealanders take quiet pride in the sight of the “pretty communist” defending a rules-based international order, in opposition to the stance taken by the president of the US, a nation that was once the self-appointed leader of the free world. One wonders whether the farmer from Morrinsville appreciated the irony of that moment.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alan Collins, Professor of Geology, University of Adelaide

Thousands of Australians travel to Thailand each year to lie on a beach at Phuket, meditate at a Buddhist temple in Ayutthaya, spot wild elephants at Khao Yai National Park, or go on some other adventure.

But how many realise that beneath their feet, the framework of the country once formed part of the same continent as Australia?

Our new research, published in Lithos, uncovered the deep links between Australia and Thailand, rebuilding the geography of this part of the ancient supersized continent Gondwana.

Read more: A map that fills a 500-million year gap in Earth’s history

This was a time before the dinosaurs, when the first forests turned the land green and giant dragonflies tracked airways through the vegetation.

Our work suggests that some fictional time-travelling Phuket beach-lover could have walked to the Pilbara in Western Australia. A pre-Jurassic culture vulture in Ayutthaya could have trekked over an ancient Indonesian-like volcanic island chain, and some Khao Yai elephant-ancestor could have rampaged through the site of the Perth CBD.

On the move

Tracking these bits of continents and their dance across the globe is part of a large effort to map our planet through its history. Last year we published a map of half a billion years of Earth history.

This was one of the first forays into mapping Earth in deep time. But putting the details on these maps is far from straightforward.

To do this, scientists first try to find geological hints in the rocks of two regions to suggest they are related to each other and have similar histories.

The problem with much of Southeast Asia is that the rocks on the surface are too young – they left Gondwana between 400 million and 300 million years ago, and the rocks we need to see are now buried.

Our research gets around this by using some of these young rocks – granites that formed the roots of old volcanoes – as upside-down probes to fingerprint the deeper Earth.

The idea is that the granite magma mixed a little with the older rocks below as it worked its way up in the crust, forming a unique molten rock soup with subtle chemical differences that can help map the geological basement.

Our study in Thailand used granites, between 500 million and 80 million years old, to discover these characteristics of the older underlying basement rocks. These granites contained chemical markers from the magma that can date when it formed and separated from the mantle. In some cases, these date back nearly 3 billion years.

The three blocks of Thailand

Thailand may be one country now, but it is made up of three distinct geological regions: Sibumasu, Sukhothai, and Indochina.

These three blocks all originated in different parts of Gondwana and collided about 200 million years ago. That is a long time ago, but geologically not so old when you consider that the planet is 4,650 million years old.

Sibumasu makes up most of the Thai peninsula and follows north into northwestern Thailand past Tham Luang cave – where the young soccer team and coach were rescued earlier this year – and into Myanmar.

Sukhothai is a volcanic arc system like modern Indonesia or Japan. It cuts through the middle of Thailand past the historic city of Sukhothai, extending southeast to the ruby and sapphire market town of Chanthaburi.

Indochina includes everything in Thailand east of the Sukhothai block, and extends into Cambodia and Vietnam.

Three blocks, three different fingerprints

Although these three blocks form one country today, their telltale chemical fingerprints show a varied history. Sibumasu has very ancient isotopic markers, similar to parts of northwestern Australia.

Read more: What’s Australia made of? Geologically, it depends on the state you’re in

But the granites from Indochina tell a different, shorter story. The chemical fingerprints from this block show that it formed from melting of the deep Earth much more recently than Sibumasu.

This eastern region formed only between 1.28 billion and 500 million years ago – still very old, granted, but not nearly as old as the Thai Peninsula and Sibumasu. Similar compositions of rocks occurred smeared along the west coast of Australia, and especially in the Margaret River wine region of Western Australia.

The Sukhothai block is chemically somewhere between Sibumasu and Indochina, with separation from the deep earth mantle modelled between 1.74 billion and 850 million years ago.

These intermediate values from the Sukhothai granites are probably a result of mixing of the more youthful Indochina with ancient recycled Sibumasu when the blocks collided and one was pushed over the other.

Thai-Australian reunion?

Australia is currently moving north by up to seven centimetres per year. As we creep towards Asia, like it or lump it, Australia’s future really is with Asia.

So Australians, just hang on, enjoy the ride, in a few tens of million years the southern Thai beaches will be a short drive away.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

Michelle Grattan discusses the week in Australian politics with University of Canberra’s deputy VC Nick Klomp. They discuss Scott Morrison’s announcement regarding the possible relocation of Australia’s embassy to Jerusalem, the government “administrative error” in supporting a motion from Pauline Hanson, a possible leadership challenge within the Nationals party, and the Wentworth byelection on Saturday.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Paul Behrens, Assistant Professor of Energy and Environmental Change, Leiden University

With the release of the latest special report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, it’s time we talk frankly about Bioenergy Carbon Capture and Sequestration, known as BECCS. It is one of the key technologies many models say we will need to limit warming to 1.5℃.

Read more: The UN’s 1.5°C special climate report at a glance

BECCS involves growing plants which remove carbon dioxide as they grow and are then burned in power stations to produce electricity. The resulting carbon dioxide from this combustion is captured and stored underground. The result is carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere.

It is the not-so-high-tech wonder many are waiting for, but it comes at a high price. It also risks delaying policies that actually reduce emissions in the first place.

Mapping the future, now

According to models, BECCS is the technology we are banking on to fix our climate disruption and safeguard our future. The models have doubled down on BECCS, but it is an unproven solution on a large scale – and one that has significant and damaging side effects.

There are three choices on the table (we will likely see a mix of at least two):

• Equitable sustainability Massive amounts of low-carbon energy (solar, wind, batteries, electric vehicles), huge improvements in energy efficiency, a revolution of the food systems and a transition of society towards lower growth, both in population and economy.

• Hypothetical backstop Continue down the road we are on, and hope to “overcorrect” the problem in the future by sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. A lack of political will and intense lobbying has meant what was once a fairly manageable problem has become an exercise in inventing heroic backstops.

• Cowboy optimism Engineer the planet (even further) to ease the impacts of climate disruption, but not the underlying causes themselves.

The first choice means we change ourselves and alter the way we do things. The second means we continue polluting as we do now, and hope to clean up later. This option is a bit like the plastic clean-up trial currently underway in the Pacific.

Choice three means we simply paper over the cracks, perhaps saving some aspects of human civilisation but pushing large parts of nature to extinction.

It’s worth noting that in any scenario, massive investment by richer countries on behalf of poorer countries will be necessary. This is already a significant problem).

Given the delay, the majority of 1.5℃ and 2℃ scenarios run by models have doubled down on the second choice. But this lessens the need for unprecedented changes today.

Read more: New UN report outlines ‘urgent, transformational’ change needed to hold global warming to 1.5°C

The reliance is so heavy that, on average, current models for meeting 2℃ suggest we will be using BECCS and afforestation to mop up total, annual global emissions by around 2070 (or 2055 for 1.5℃). This results in a massive growth in BECCS power plants through this period, from three today to 700 by 2030, and 16,000 by 2060.

Bonfire of the BECCS

But large-scale BECCS is a monumentally tricky idea. BECCS aims to fix one thing – climate disruption – but makes many other things worse.

BECCS on an industrial scale needs many resources. Plants need land, water and fertilisers (sometimes) to grow, and infrastructure to get low-density plant matter from one place to another. We already struggle to do this sustainably.

Related to this, it is reasonable to think that BECCS will increase food prices. We have to produce 70% extra food by 2050 to just keep up with population and food demand increases. Can we do this while using vast tracts of land for BECCS production? Perhaps only if we have a big change in dietary habits which frees up land?

While BECCS will provide some electricity, you don’t get much bang for your buck – it has the lowest power density of any other type of energy.

BECCS make use of thermal power plants so inherit many problems related to running them. Power plants are heat engines and need water for cooling. We already have problems with water cooling, and it is getting worse with climate change.

Finally, BECCS power plants will produce ash, which is a “better” version than the ash from coal plants (it doesn’t take much), but will still need attention.

The role of Integrated Assessment Models

The origin story for BECCS has been told elsewhere, but how did we end up in a situation where the large majority of models point to this one problematic solution? These models are called Integrated Assessment Models, and come in two main varieties: simple and complex.

The complex ones are mostly used for investigating technology choices. The simple ones are often used to explore what the cost of carbon could be. This year’s Nobel Prize winner in economics, Bill Nordhaus, works with these simple models.

The overall weaknesses of these models have been covered in compelling and entertaining ways. Given the depth of the complex models, it is difficult to be sure why BECCS dominates. Most would agree that there are three likely possibilities.

First, these models discount future benefits and costs to a large extent. That is, they assume that future benefits and costs are much less in the future than they are today. The default rate at which models discount is 5% per year, meaning that to avoid $100 of climate damage in 2100 is only worth $3 to us today. Many have argued that this is much too high, ethically inappropriate, and misleading.

I know of only one study which performs a sensitivity analysis using so-called discount rates. It finds that carbon dioxide removal is significantly reduced with lower discount rates.

Second, these models are very sensitive to prices and since a very low price for BECCS is assumed, this is the technology that dominates. The problem is that we don’t actually know what these prices might be, especially on a large scale.

Third, these models have a difficult job estimating the damage from climate change. The risk from emitting now and paying later is fat-tailed – there is a non-negligible increased risk of catastrophe even if we do manage to implement choice two at a large scale.

Taking off the BECCS blinders

Are there technologies other than BECCS? If we must hypothesise backstop technologies, then direct air capture is a possibility. As the name implies, it sucks carbon directly from the air.

Although it doesn’t generate energy in the process (in fact it uses large amounts of energy), it doesn’t have as many of the problems faced by BECCS. A possible future consists of solar-powered direct air capture in the Middle Eastern desert pulling carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and pumping it underground into reservoirs from which oil was once pumped. This is speculative though, comes with it’s own big problems, and as yet doesn’t feature much in modelling efforts due to its high cost (though they are coming down quickly though).

Read more: The science is clear: we have to start creating our low-carbon future today

Fortunately, there are an increasing number of studies which take a non-backstop approach. These still use integrated assessment modelling, but investigate other options, like very low-energy demand scenarios and large-scale behaviour change (for example to plant-based diets) which reduce other, non-CO₂ gases quickly.

There is nothing to be lost by committing to the first choice as fast as possible. In fact, many of the important solutions are better for our health too (such as using bikes instead of cars, plant-based diets, and insulating houses). And if we end up needing BECCS, then so be it, but the earlier we start moving to low-carbon economies, the more potential catastrophes we avoid.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Katerina Teaiwa, Associate Professor, Australian National University

Environment Minister Melissa Price has been trending on Twitter this week – and not for any good environmental reasons.

Price was introduced to the former president of Kiribati, Anote Tong, during a dinner at a Canberra restaurant hosted by Labor Senator Pat Dodson. Tong has brought global attention to his country because of the existential challenges it faces from climate change and rising sea levels.

According to Dodson, Price made what many have deemed an insulting comment to Tong:

I know why you’re here. It’s for the cash. For the Pacific it’s always about the cash. I have my chequebook here. How much do you want?

Others at the restaurant verified Dodson’s version of the incident. For his part, Tong said he has some hearing problems and others closer to Price could better hear what she said.

My response on Twitter was that in Kiribati, it’s rude to call out bad behaviour in public.

Maybe Price thought she was making a good Aussie joke. Or maybe she’d observed other members of her party laughing at the expense of the Pacific and wanted to crack one like the rest of the boys.

Read more: For Pacific Island nations, rising sea levels are a bigger security concern than rising Chinese influence

Peter Dutton’s foray into comedy in 2015 springs to mind. In response to a quip by then-Prime Minister Tony Abbott about how islanders are not good at being on time, Dutton said:

Time doesn’t mean anything when you’re about to have water lapping at your door.

Water lapping at the door apparently doesn’t translate into concern over climate change and global warming – a matter of urgency for the low-lying island nations in the Pacific.

Rather than share the concerns of Pacific leaders on this issue, some Australian politicians have chosen to trivialise them and accuse Pacific nations of only being interested in a cash grab.

Just last month, Liberal Senator Ian Macdonald also accused Pacific nations of swindling money from Australia to address the effects of rising sea levels. The Sydney Morning Herald reported him saying:

They might be Pacific islanders, but there’s no doubting their wisdom and their ability to extract a dollar where they see it.

If Macdonald had been listening to the Canberra speech last month by Dame Meg Taylor, the secretary-general of the Pacific Islands Forum, he would have heard a very different message:

It is absolutely essential that we work together to move the discussion with Australia to develop a pathway that will minimise the impacts of climate change for the future of all … including Australia.

So far this call has fallen on deaf ears.

Australia’s history of phosphate extraction

Australians know well how polite and friendly Pacific people are. Flights to Fiji during school holidays are packed with families seeking sun, sand and true island hospitality. But both the shallow view of the Pacific as a paradise, and political slurs of cash-hungry islanders, reveal a deep Australian ignorance of Pacific histories, environments, peoples and cultural values, and of Australia’s projects of colonial extraction in the region.

For over a century, Australia has had an intense social and cultural relationship with Oceania, paralleling its economic and geo-strategic interests, and not just with Papua New Guinea or Melanesian states.

From the start of the 20th century, Australian mining companies began extracting phosphate as fast as they could from Nauru and Banaba island (in what is now Kiribati) in order to grow the country’s agricultural industry.

And grow it did, exponentially, while consuming the landscapes of much smaller Pacific islands. Pacific phosphate – and the superphosphate fertiliser it produced – was the magic dust of Australian agriculture. Little could have been grown here without it, as Australia has always been “a continent of soils with a low plant nutrient supply”.

But decades of phosphate mining on Banaba stripped away about 90% of the island’s surface. By the late 1970s, when the mining operations ended, 22 million tons of land had been removed. The island wasn’t rehabilitated and all the mining infrastructure was left to rust and decay.

Read more: Pacific pariah: how Australia’s love of coal has left it out in the diplomatic cold

Many Banabans were relocated to Rabi Island in Fiji over the years, including my grandfather. It was a migration that foreshadows future relocations that many Pacific islanders face due to climate change.

It’s hypocritical for Australian leaders to accuse the Pacific of being solely after money, when Australia exploited Banaba and other Pacific islands in this way. At a time, when the future of many Pacific nations is under threat, a little compassion, responsibility and real action on climate change is in order, not jokes or barbs at islanders’ expense.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jonti Horner, Professor (Astrophysics), University of Southern Queensland

Out in the depths of the Solar system, astronomers recently discovered a small, icy object, named 2015 TG387.

First observed in October 2015, it has been nicknamed “The Goblin” by its discoverers. It is currently almost 12 billion kilometres from the Sun – about 80 times the distance between Earth and the Sun (or 80au, where 1au is the distance from Earth to the Sun).

“The Goblin” is thought to be about 300km in diameter, and moves on a highly elongated orbit, far beyond the realm of the eight planets (Mercury to Neptune). It is so distant that it takes more than 34,000 years to orbit the Sun.

Read more: Discovered: a huge liquid water lake beneath the southern pole of Mars

What’s most exciting about the new discovery, though, is that it might hold the key to helping astronomers discover an unseen planet that some believe lurks in the Solar system’s icy depths.

The history of Planet X

In 1984, research suggested that, over the past 250 million years, mass extinctions had happened on Earth every 26 million years. But what could cause such periodic extinctions?

A hypothetical red dwarf star, known as Nemesis, was proposed to orbit the Sun at a great distance. Every 26 million years, as it passed through its closest approach to the Sun, the star would scatter a deluge of comets towards the inner Solar system. The result? One or more of those comets would collide with Earth, triggering a mass extinction.

But over the years the evidence waned, and no companion star was found. Nemesis passed into history.

At the turn of the millennium, a new “Planet X” was proposed – nicknamed Tyche. Where Nemesis was the bringer of death, Tyche’s influence was more subtle, resulting in a slight increase in the number of inbound comets from certain regions of the sky, and explaining observed peculiarities in the distribution of those comets.

Once again, observations soon weakened the case for Tyche. The final nail came with NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), which looked at the entire sky at infrared wavelengths. If Tyche existed, WISE would almost certainly have found it.

Still, the idea of an unseen planet beyond Neptune’s orbit rears its head every few years. In 2008 an unseen, distant Earth-mass planet was proposed to explain the distribution of small, icy bodies beyond Neptune.

Other researchers pointed out that planet-mass objects could have formed along with the Solar system’s outer planets, before being scattered outward, but never ejected.

All this brings us to Planet X’s latest incarnation – known as “Planet Nine”.

Planet X reborn: Planet Nine

The story of Planet Nine begins with Sedna, a dwarf planet discovered beyond Pluto in November 2003. Sedna has a highly unusual orbit, with its orbital distance varying between 76au and 936au from the Sun. This poses an obvious question: how did Sedna get captured in that orbit?

At its closest, Sedna is too distant for the planets to perturb it – they cannot be responsible. At its farthest, Sedna is still just one 1/400th of the distance to the nearest star – so close to the Sun that it is very unlikely a passing star could do the deed.

To explain the odd orbit, several theorists suggested that Sedna could have been placed on its orbit when the Solar system was young. At that time, the Sun would have been embedded within a stellar cluster, and close encounters with other stars would have been more frequent.

Now, if Sedna’s orbit was the result of capture during the Solar system’s youth, one might expect other objects to have shared the same fate. The theory therefore predicted that Sedna could be one of a population of Sednoids, all moving on similar orbits.

In the past decade, several more Sednoids have been found. Peculiarly, all of their orbits seem to align, roughly, in space. In other words, the long axes of their orbits all point in roughly the same direction. This is not what you would expect of a population born of the Sun’s birth cluster. So what could be the cause?

To explain Sedna’s unusual orbit, several researchers invoked a variety of Planets X. As new objects were discovered, these theories were continually revisited, until US researchers Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown came up with the current version, which they nicknamed “Planet Nine”.

Batygin and Brown propose that Planet Nine is comparable in mass to Neptune, moving on a highly eccentric orbit, with a period of around 15,000 years.

With this theory comes a prediction: as more Sednoids are found, the evidence for the planet will grow, as those objects will also have been sculpted to their current orbits by the hidden planet’s influence.

But astronomers are not universally convinced that an unseen planet is to blame for the alignment of the unusual objects. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and there has been much debate over whether the theory stands up to scrutiny.

As with Tyche, proposed at the turn of the millennium, the apparent clustering of these distant objects could instead be the result of observational biases.

Simply put, we are more likely to find such faint objects in some parts of the night sky than in others. Since we find those objects at or near perihelion – when they are nearest to the Sun, so at their brightest – that would naturally create just such a cluster of orbits from the first discoveries.

How to break the impasse? More discoveries are needed. Which brings us to our newly discovered friend, “The Goblin”.

Discovering our ghoulish friend

2015 TG387 was first observed on October 13, 2015, with follow-up observations carried out over the past three years. The extended observations show TG387’s orbit is even more extreme than Sedna’s.

TG387’s orbit brings it in to around 65au, but stretches all the way out to 2,027au, and one lap takes more than 34,000 years to complete.

Like the other objects that hint at the presence of Planet Nine, TG387’s orbit is oriented just right to add weight to that hypothesis.

Read more: Planet or dwarf planet: all worlds are worth investigating

So does this mean that Planet Nine is real?

While this could be an extra piece of evidence for the planet’s existence, it is far from definitive. It could equally be the case that TG387 is further evidence that observational biases drive the clustering.

We need to find more objects before we can be sure, either way. Fortunately, there are likely to be millions of similar objects like TG387 – indeed, its discovers predict that it is just one of several million bodies, all moving on similar orbits in the Solar system’s icy depths.